Canonical has finally stepped into the world of containers with the launch of a commercially supported Kubernetes distribution. The new development is designed to provide the Kubernetes standard across all public and private infrastructure.

“Companies moving to hyper-elastic container operations have asked for a pure Kubernetes on Ubuntu with enterprise support,” said Dustin Kirkland, head of Ubuntu product and strategy, Canonical, in a statement. “Our focus is operational simplicity while delivering robust security, elasticity and compatibility with the Kubernetes standard across all public and private infrastructure.”

The integrated Kubernetes stack through Canonical and Google partnership can be deployed on any private, public or hybrid cloud environment. Also, it is certified to run on infrastructures such as Google Compute Platform, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, VMware, OpenStack and Canonical’s own bare metal cloud MAAS.

Instead of a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Canonical is offering the standard Kubernetes base as an open and extensible platform and its APIs with constant behaviour are available for corporate workgroups on multiple cloud environments. The platform itself enables scale deployments when combined with Juju and Canonical’s DevOps toolchain. There is also Prometheus integration for monitoring, Ceph for storage and an integrated Elastic stack with Kibana for analysis and visualisations.

Favourite container tool

Canonical’s inclination towards Kubernetes is not an unexpected move. In fact, tech companies like Red Hat, Intel, VMware and Mirantis all are considering Google’s Kubernetes as an ultimate solution for their container-related developments. The open source framework is also a favourite container tool for many enterprises opting the cloud computing model.

Google forward, Kubernetes is likely to get extended with native support for managing LXD deployments. This would make the competition tougher for orchestration tools like Docker Swarm and Cloudify.

In the meantime, Canonical is offering a fully managed Kubernetes solution to reach enterprises and corporates. Enterprise support for the tool is also available through the Ubuntu Advantage support programme to fully commercialise its presence across public and private infrastructure.